Nobody's Saint (20 page)

“They have gratefully accepted penance for the good of their souls,” Tomás replied.

Bishop Álvarez leaned back in his chair. “Perhaps there is no need to trouble the Grand Inquisitor with this. The Holy Office exists to deal in heresies, not miracles. I must speak with this Diego Montoya.”

“As you think best, Your Excellency. It is growing late. Might you wish to dine first? I can have something brought to you.”

“Thank you, Tomás. Actually, I would prefer to wait until tomorrow so I might draw up a list of questions, but I would be dismayed to find Captain Montoya gone before I can settle this.”

“Diego would never leave without your permission, but perhaps you could ask Juan Gallegos to take him, as well. Señor Gallegos can be trusted to make sure Diego returns.”

“See to it, Tomás. You are dismissed.”

*

By the time Diego arrived at Don Juan’s, Mary Kate had decided to forgive him for being so rude in the cathedral. For one thing, she had to acknowledge that he was under a great deal of stress, and she was genuinely worried about him. For another, no one in the Gallegos household spoke English, and she was near to crazy for someone to talk to! She had been waiting for him in the drawing room, and the sight of his furrowed brow and the grim set of his mouth melted the last traces of her pique.

“Not the Inquisition!” she cried.

“Not yet.” He dropped his lean frame into one of the tapestry-covered chairs in the richly appointed room. “Father Tomás has convinced the bishop that this is not yet a matter for the Inquisition.”

Mary Kate crossed herself. “Thank God for that.”

“I will be questioned tomorrow. In time, I think they will question you, as well.”

“And I shall tell them of how bravely and honorably you have acted in all the short time I have known you.”

“There are things I must tell you. I want you to hear them from me, first.”

“I’ll never believe you committed any act of heresy,” she said, but she felt a tingle of apprehension all the same. What could he possibly want to tell her?

“The first time you saw me, did I seem at all familiar? Did you have no sense that you had known me before?”

“How could I? I have never been to Spain or any of her lands. Had you ever been to Ireland or England?”

“No, not like that. Had you ever dreamt of me?”

Mary Kate shifted in her own chair and looked away. Why was Diego asking her these things? Such silly romantic notions had hardly been a part of what had gone on between them. Then she remembered him asking her this before, murmuring these questions in the heat of passion.

She struggled to answer as gently as possible. “Of course I dreamt I would someday find a handsome and noble man. Not a nobleman, God help me, but a man like yourself. You’re just the sort of man every girl dreams of.”

“But you never dreamed of me, Diego Montoya?”

“I’d never met you, Diego.”

“But I had met you. I recognized you the second I laid eyes on you on the deck of that pirate ship. Only, you were not who I thought you were.”

“And who was that?”

“María Magdalena.”

“A Spanish girl?”

“
Santa
María Magdalena.”

“
Saint
Mary Magdalene? From the
Bible
, Mary Magdalene?”

“You think I am crazy.”

“I don’t know what to think, that’s sure. Why would you think such a thing as that?”

“I told you I had dreams.”

“About pirate ships, aye.”

“You asked me who I was talking to.”

“And you said it were yourself.”

“I lied.”

Mary Kate stood and began to pace. “You don’t lie, Diego.”

“I lied then. I was talking to Magdalena. She has been coming to me in times of crisis for three years now.”

“Saints preserve us! Are you sure?”

He laughed without mirth. “No. If you suddenly started to see and hear a saint, would you be sure?”

“I don’t know. I can’t imagine.”

He stood, too, and took her hand, in part out of the need to touch her and in part to stop her pacing. “At first, I did not question her. She offered me comfort. She kept my crew and my ship safe. She brought me honor. Why would I question?”

“Then why do you question now?”

“She promised me love. She promised me a woman.”

Mary Kate’s eyes widened and she whispered, “Me? Is that why you keep asking about my dreams? Did she make you dream of me?”

“Not precisely. You see,
you
are the very image of my dreams of
her
.”

She pulled her hand from his and sank back into her chair. “You’re saying I look like Mary Magdalene? That you thought I was her when first you saw me?”

“I did. And then, I thought you were the woman she had promised me.”

“You
thought
I was. I suppose you’ve thought better of it since then. No saint would send a man someone like me in answer to his prayers.”

“No! I did not mean it like that!”

Mary Kate managed a laugh despite the bizarre nature of the conversation and her uneasiness with it. “Don’t go making a habit out of lying to me now, Diego.”

He, too, sat back down. “You are not Spanish, and you are betrothed to an Englishman.”

“And I lie and swear, and I’m a lusty lass besides. I know I’m not the sort of girl a decent,
honorable
Spaniard such as yourself dreams of. Not for a wife anyway.”

“If I had known you sooner, I would have dreamed of a woman who was brave and bold, loyal and irreverent. If I had been thinking, I would have wanted a lusty wife, for then I would never have need of a mistress.”

“So that’s why the sudden push to marry me when we hardly knew one another.”

“
Sí
.”

She started to smile, but a new thought intruded. “No wait! Not because I’m the woman of your dreams! You wanted to marry to me to prove that Magdalene was right! You were starting to doubt her, but if we got married, then yet another of your visions would come true!”

“That is true, but—”

“And then you’d not have to worry if you were crazy!”

“Well—”

Mary Kate popped back out of her chair and glared down at Diego. “So tell me this, are you so anxious to prove her true that you’ll come with me to Ireland? Will you give up your fine ship for a modest fishing boat and learn
my
language?”

“That was never a part of my visions.”

“I don’t suppose it was. Well, they’re your visions, Diego, not mine! I never saw you in my dreams! I never thought you were Saint John or Saint James! Why should I give up my home and turn my back on my family to prove your saint true?”

“Because I want you. I want you more than I have ever wanted another woman.”

“You want me because you think I’ve been promised to you. You’re no different from that English bastard in Port Royal. You want me because Mary Magdalene said you could have me. The other wants me because my grandfather said I was his. Well, I don’t belong to anyone save myself, and I’ll be deciding who I want! I’m not your saint, Diego, and I never will be.”

“María Catalina…”

“Mary Katherine! I am Mary Katherine O’Reilly. I’m not a snobbish, arrogant English aristocrat nor a chaste and submissive Spanish maiden. I’m an Irishwoman with all the fire of my da’s whiskey and a life of my own to lead! I’ll go to your bishop and tell him you’re a good man. I’ll say all I can to keep you safe, but then I’m going home, and that’s that! Your saint can find you somebody else.”

Don Juan and his wife threw open the drawing room doors, obviously worried about the shouting, and Mary Kate brushed past them, running toward the room they had given her.

“Now that your conversation with Señorita O’Reilly is finished,” Don Juan observed, “perhaps you would be good enough to tell me what is going on.”

Diego buried his face in his hands. He had always been told that saints could answer his prayers and intercede on his behalf. No one had ever told him they could make things worse!

Mary Kate stood on the wooden balcony outside of her room in the Gallegos house. It was located in a part of the city called El Centro, which was made up of residences for the aristocracy and higher members of the government. Surrounded by stately homes and lush trees, she couldn’t see the sea, and she found she missed it—the flawless blue, the steady rocking.

She had pulled a chair from her room out onto the balcony, and she sat down and breathed deeply of the heavy air scented sweetly by tropical flowers. If only she could dismiss Diego’s words as the rantings of a madman, but she didn’t for a moment believe he was insane. She knew him too well to believe that.

“Why, Mary Magdalene, why would you do such a thing?”

The night was hot, and no breeze found its way through the buildings and trees. Mary Kate felt overly warm and suddenly very dizzy and overwhelmed. She leaned her elbow on the arm of the chair and her cheek upon her palm, then closed her eyes.

She was in her grandfather’s house in England. It was small, but Sir Calder had spared no expense in its furnishings, and Mary Kate stood before one of the tapestries that hung in the drawing room. It depicted three medieval knights on horseback bidding farewell to the women they must leave behind. Sir Calder had purchased it from an impoverished nobleman. Just as she had often done during her stay in England, Mary Kate scrutinized it, awed by its intricate detail.

But she spotted a slight irregularity in the leg one of the knights’ horses. Closer inspection revealed that the seamstress had made several mistakes in her stitches. She scanned the area around it and discovered similar flaws throughout the work, but when she stepped back, the flaws faded, and the tapestry was as beautiful as ever. Still, her eyes were continually drawn back to the tiny defect in the horse.

“Perhaps,” she said aloud, although she was alone, “I could fix that.” She looked down at her feet and discovered a sewing basket, and from it she drew a pair of tiny, silver scissors. Carefully, she clipped away the misstitched threads, intending to use the thread in her basket to set it to rights, but almost immediately the hole she had made grew. Stitches began to unravel, and she feared she would not be able to repair the damage she had caused, much less the small flaw she probably should have left alone.

Suddenly Bridget stood beside her. She wore the plain style of gown both of them had always worn at home, and it contrasted sharply with Mary Kate’s fine English clothes. “When you look at the tapestry as a whole, it is a work of art, despite its flaws.”

“And yet,” Mary Kate replied, “when a imperfection calls to you, and you have at your feet the means to repair it, ‘tis tempting to try.”

In the blink of an eye, the two women stood in the solar of a stone-walled keep. Several women in medieval veils and gowns sat side by side at a long frame, each plying her needle to create the lovely scene that had been finished and on the wall only a moment before. Several younger girls chatted by the fire. Mary Kate looked over the shoulder of one of the seamstresses and realized she was busy on the soldier and his horse.

“Careful, now,” Mary Kate chided her. “That leg is very delicate, and ‘twould be easy to make a mistake.”

The woman didn’t look over her shoulder or in any way acknowledge that she had heard Mary Kate, but she seemed distracted and pricked her finger deeply.

“Ouch!” she cried.

“Are you all right?” a young girl asked, rising from her seat beside the fire. “I can take your place, Aunt Edith, until it stops bleeding.”

The older woman rose, nodding, and the girl took her seat. She was nowhere near the accomplished needlewoman her aunt was, and soon she was making a far bigger mess of the pattern than the minor error Mary Kate had first discovered.

Mary Kate gave a disgusted sigh. “All right then, I should have left well enough alone.”

And then they were in the middle of a green field surrounded by grazing sheep. Mary Kate knelt and ran her hand over the soft, wooly back of one of the animals. She dug her fingers deeply into the beast’s coat, sorting through it until she found one fine strand that she somehow knew would be carded and spun and twisted into the thread that would become the leg of a horse on an elaborate tapestry.

“You can know each individual step in the existence of that strand,” Bridget explained to her, “but you cannot truly understand what place it will hold until you step back from the tapestry.”

They were seated at a tea table across the room from where the tapestry hung in Sir Calder’s house. From here, the design was perfect. Not a single mistake could be seen in the work.

“Well, I know that,” Mary Kate said, “but you can’t blame a person for wanting to take a closer look. Especially when some little thread begs your help. When it’s so worried about not being perfect, and being inside the design, it can’t see that very little about the work is truly perfect.”

“But you can see that,” Bridget said. “You can see the big picture, so long as you don’t get too caught up in that one little place. You’re too involved, Mary.”

And that was strange, for no one ever called her just Mary. It gave Mary Kate the weird feeling these two women were not her sister and herself at all, but two others entirely.

“But I like that soldier and his horse. He named the horse after me, y’know. And look at this maid over here…” She rose and moved to another section of the tapestry.

Bridget followed Mary Kate back to the hanging. “If she’s the one for him, then the thread already exists that binds them together.”

“Fate? You know better than that,” Mary Kate chided.

“Not fate,” Bridget countered. “At the point of creation, anything can happen. You saw that with Edith and her niece. You and I are better off here, long after the seamstresses are dead and buried. From time to time we might smooth their work.” She found a place where a thread had pulled loose in the embroidered maiden’s jet-black hair and gently worked it back into place with her fingertips. “But it is not ours to change. Not now, not even at the point of creation.”